Get Creative with Your Marketing!

Whether you own a business or offer a personal service, marketing your brand and yourself carries enormous importance in your ability to convey value, meet and connect with potential customers and ultimately drive revenues.

People who know sales and marketing say that today’s market is more about marketing than it is about selling.

This means that the days of the hard sell are essentially gone, buyers want to be educated, convinced and generally make a buying decision before they ever speak with someone directly.

We certainly can thank the internet for this transition to avoidance of personal connection between buyers and sellers.

From a salesperson’s perspective, this can be both good and bad, the tough part now is that you don’t have that opportunity to really read and get to know a buyer like you might have in the past.

The amount of in person selling across the board is dropping, even phone selling is becoming less relevant.

What’s good about this paradigm is the ability of the seller to get in contact with the buyer earlier in the sales process than ever before.

Buyers start looking for information, researching and trying to pull together a consideration months or even years earlier than they would have if making a phone call or going to a tradeshow were the only options.

This scenario presents great opportunities for those who embrace marketing and the art of cultivating the lead.

It also means that you better embrace marketing if you are selling a product or service if you are interested in driving growth.

First and foremost, video is in

If you haven’t created video logs, marketing presentations and other web-based video presentations, you are missing one of the biggest opportunities in marketing today.

Videos can be produced professionally at a fraction of the cost of what they used to require and they help establish personal rapport with a buyer before you even have a chance to speak or meet with them.

Buyers want to know that you are a real person and most people prefer video to reading so your message as a better chance of getting heard.

In my business of marketing franchises, the connection with the company offering the franchise is of the utmost importance.

All of the tangible aspects of what you are selling can be listed out and put in front of a buyer, but what makes a buyer trust and ultimately act is liking the person selling and feeling comfortable doing business with that person.

Spend some money to create great videos, tell good stories and use those videos to your advantage both in postings and in follow up such as directing buyers to the videos you want them to see.

Second, leverage influencers in your relevant market

There are people out there who are connected and your potential customers listen to what they have to say.

You can generally find out who the influencers are in your market just with some basic research.

Review blogs that have to do with your industry segment

If you sell clothing products on etsy and are considering ways to promote to influencers in the relevant clothing market segment, try searching terms like “Clothing Product Blogs” or set up a Google Alert for “Selling Clothing Products on Etsy” so that you are alerted when relevant sites are crawled by google.

When you find someone who is active and “busy”, writing content and interacting with their followers….you’ve got your influencer.

Now you need to approach them and develop a relationship, which depending on the candidate influencer, this can be tough if they are sought after as a marketing source.

But in other cases, influencers are looking for new connections and ideas to keep their content fresh and if you start with an email introducing yourself, make it personal (Send your video introduction link) and don’t push too hard, the right connection will happen naturally.

Don’t be afraid to follow up also and follow those target influencers on whatever social media you can find them on to show you are paying attention to their work.

Once you have an influencer or two…or ten, you can leverage their networks and connections and voice to market your product or service with extreme efficiency.

Strategic Franchise Brokers is a full service franchise consulting and franchise advisory group leveraging years of experience in franchising to support you in making better business decisions related to franchising.